This work details a multigrid-accelerated cut-cell Cartesian mesh methodology for the solution of a single partial differential equation set that describes incompressible as well as compressible flow. The latter includes sub-, trans- and supersonic flows. Cut-cell technology is developed which furnishes body-fitted meshes with an overlapping Cartesian mesh as starting point, and in a manner which is insensitive to surface definition inconsistencies. An edge-based vertex-centred finite volume method is employed for the purpose of spatial discretisation. Further, an alternative dual-mesh construction strategy is developed and the standard discretisation scheme suitably enhanced. Incompressibility is dealt with via a locally preconditioned artificial compressibility algorithm, and stabilisation is in all cases achieved with scalar-valued artificial dissipation. In transonic flows, shocks are captured via pressure switch-activated upwinding. The solution process is accelerated by the use of a full approximation scheme (FAS) multigrid method where coarse meshes are generated automatically via a volume agglomeration methodology. The developed modelling technology is validated by application to the solution of a number of benchmark problems. The standard discretisation as well as the alternative method are found to be equivalent in terms of both accuracy and computational cost. Finally, the multigrid implementation is shown to achieve decreases in CPU time of between a factor two to one order of magnitude. In the context of cut-cell Cartesian meshes, the above work has resulted in the following novel contributions: the development of an alternative vertex-centred discretisation method; the use of volume agglomerated multigrid solution technology and the use of a single equation set for both incompressible and compressible flows. / Dissertation (MEng (Mechanical Engineering))--University of Pretoria, 2007. / Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering / unrestricted

Le calcul scientifique parallèle est un domaine en plein essor qui permet à la fois d’augmenter la vitesse des longs traitements, de traiter des problèmes de taille plus importante ou encore des problèmes plus précis. Ce domaine permet donc d’aller plus loin dans les calculs scientifiques, d’obtenir des résultats plus pertinents, car plus précis, ou d’étudier des problèmes plus volumineux qu’auparavant. Dans le monde plus particulier de la simulation numérique scientifique, la résolution d’équations aux dérivées partielles (EDP) est un calcul particulièrement demandeur de ressources parallèles. Si les ressources matérielles permettant le calcul parallèle sont de plus en plus présentes et disponibles pour les scientifiques, à l’inverse leur utilisation et la programmation parallèle se démocratisent difficilement. Pour cette raison, des modèles de programmation parallèle, des outils de développement et même des langages de programmation parallèle ont vu le jour et visent à simplifier l’utilisation de ces machines. Il est toutefois difficile, dans ce domaine dit du “parallélisme implicite”, de trouver le niveau d’abstraction idéal pour les scientifiques, tout en réduisant l’effort de programmation. Ce travail de thèse propose tout d’abord un modèle permettant de mettre en oeuvre des solutions de parallélisme implicite pour les simulations numériques et la résolution d’EDP. Ce modèle est appelé “Structured Implicit Parallelism for scientific SIMulations” (SIPSim), et propose une vision au croisement de plusieurs types d’abstraction, en tentant de conserver les avantages de chaque vision. Une première implémentation de ce modèle, sous la forme d’une librairie C++ appelée SkelGIS, est proposée pour les maillages cartésiens à deux dimensions. Par la suite, SkelGIS, et donc l’implémentation du modèle, est étendue à des simulations numériques sur les réseaux (permettant l’application de simulations représentant plusieurs phénomènes physiques). Les performances de ces deux implémentations sont évaluées et analysées sur des cas d’application réels et complexes et démontrent qu’il est possible d’obtenir de bonnes performances en implémentant le modèle SIPSim. / Parallel scientific computations is an expanding domain of computer science which increases the speed of calculations and offers a way to deal with heavier or more accurate calculations. Thus, the interest of scientific computations increases, with more precised results and bigger physical domains to study. In the particular case of scientific numerical simulations, solving partial differential equations (PDEs) is an especially heavy calculation and a perfect applicant to parallel computations. On one hand, it is more and more easy to get an access to very powerfull parallel machines and clusters, but on the other hand parallel programming is hard to democratize, and most scientists are not able to use these machines. As a result, high level programming models, framework, libraries, languages etc. have been proposed to hide technical details of parallel programming. However, in this “implicit parallelism” field, it is difficult to find the good abstraction level while keeping a low programming effort. This thesis proposes a model to write implicit parallelism solutions for numerical simulations such as mesh-based PDEs computations. This model is called “Structured Implicit Parallelism for scientific SIMulations” (SIPSim), and proposes an approach at the crossroads of existing solutions, taking advantage of each one. A first implementation of this model is proposed, as a C++ library called SkelGIS, for two dimensional Cartesian meshes. A second implementation of the model, and an extension of SkelGIS, proposes an implicit parallelism solution for network-simulations (which deals with simulations with multiple physical phenomenons), and is studied in details. A performance analysis of both these implementations is given on real case simulations, and it demonstrates that the SIPSim model can be implemented efficiently.